Hezbollah Chief Says 'Americans Have to Pay' For 'Israel's Slaughter'

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave his first speech since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, and praised the Hamas attack in which 1400 Israelis were massacred.

“This great, large-scale operation was purely the result of Palestinian planning and implementation,” Nasrallah said, suggesting his militia had no part in the attack. “The great secrecy made this operation greatly successful.”

He said whoever wants to prevent a regional war must quickly stop the war on the Gaza Strip.

Hezbollah has been engaging in a psychological war against Israel since the war with Hamas began, firing artillery salvos at Israeli positions near the Lebanese border but not enough to provoke a major response. 

And Nasrallah had a message for the United States.

“Your Navy ships in the Mediterranean don’t scare us and they never did,” Nasrallah said Friday in a rebuke to the U.S.

“To the Americans, I say to you, remember your defeats in Lebanon, Iraq, in Afghanistan and remember how you humiliatingly withdrew from Afghanistan,” he said. “Today, Americans, I say to you, that those who defeated you in Lebanon at the beginning of the 80s, they are still alive and together with them we have today their children and their grandchildren.”

The U.S. has deployed two carrier battle groups to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah and other regional actors from joining the war against Israel. Even if the carriers weren't there, it's doubtful Hezbollah would engage the Israelis.

Despite Nasrallah's bluster, he has no intention of invading Israel to go toe-to-toe with the IDF. 

Associated Press:

Thursday saw the most significant escalation on the Israel-Lebanon border since the war started, with Hezbollah firing off a barrage of mortar shells and anti-tank missiles and, for the first time, exploding drones.

In Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday to urge protections for civilians in the fighting with Hamas, as Israeli troops tightened their encirclement of Gaza City.

Hezbollah has a fearsome arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles and 100,000 fighters. But only a couple of thousand of those rockets are accurate, modern weapons. Most are crude, short-range Russian World War II Katyusha Rockets.

And Hezbollah's fighters are mostly barely trained militiamen with a core group of 15,000 fighters who have fought in Syria and are very well trained and supplied. But Nasrallah doesn't want to use his best, most accurate missiles, including possibly as many as a few dozen Scud missiles supplied by Syria.

And he won't use his best fighters. Since he knows his little army would be destroyed if he ever committed the bulk of his best fighters to war against Israel, they amount to little more than showpieces for propaganda purposes.

So Nasrallah will give token support to Hamas, make bloodcurdling threats against the U.S., and will do essentially nothing. It's been Nasrallah's strategy since the 2006 war that saw several thousand of his best fighters killed and much of his missile stock destroyed.

The biggest worry is that Hezbollah probably has several terror cells in Mexico and Venezuela that wouldn't have much trouble crossing the border into the United States. If Nasrallah is serious about making the U.S. pay for our support of Israel, he's probably already set a plan in motion.